A THEORY OF INTELLIGENCE chemical problems (Identity)

dhw: Same old mantra: my soul thinks with (or “uses”) my brain, but you won’t tell us what the use is, other than for information and material expression.

DAVID: I don't understand what else you want. In life I use my brain to create thought. As me my soul does also.

You don’t want to understand what else I want. If the soul is conscious, as you keep saying it is (though then you keep saying that it isn’t), it must be able to think and therefore doesn’t need the brain to create consciousness/to think!

This is our disagreement. I theorize that since the soul is me it uses the brain to think as I do.

DAVID: I think my material body/ brain has free will.

dhw: That is a real surprise to me. Your body/brain now makes all the decisions. Frankly, if the soul can’t think without the brain, and if the brain makes the decisions, determines how intelligent we are (your Einstein example), and rearranges itself in order to preserve its powers of cognition (non-Egnor non-example of dualism), what do you need a soul for?

My soul is me. My body and brain are me. I use my brain to think and make free will decisions. So does my soul as me. You sure get confused. I've never changed my view of how it works in life.

DAVID: I view the soul as an immaterial copy of me, existing along with me but on the quantum side of the wall of uncertainty. In the afterlife the soul return to the quantum realm where the afterlife is. But the soul and I are never separate or separated by the wall.

dhw: “You” (soul and body/brain) lead a strange life! There’s the material you doing all the thinking and making all the decisions (a copy can hardly do the thinking, can it?),

But I've said all along my soul and I are the same and work as the same entity.

DAVID: I separate life and death into two very different circumstances.

dhw: Surprisingly, so do I.

Not surprising.

DAVID: The soul and I, as the same entity, use the brain to think in life, but the soul, lacking the living me, thinks and communicates telepathically, all in a quantum reality.

dhw: Back to the old mantra, except that it is now the copy of “you and you” that uses the brain to think. And you seem to have forgotten that the copy of you is helpless – it has no will of its own.

My soul is me and is not helpless any more than I am.

DAVID: By the way, Susan agrees with you and says if you accept that theory of yours about the soul you must accept God as existing.

dhw: I’m delighted to have Susan supporting my theory, which makes so much more sense than any of the multiple theories you have been proposing and discarding. And since I have no answer to the design theory – I cannot place faith in chance as the creator of all these complex mechanisms – I must accept the POSSIBILITY of God’s existence. But I find it equally difficult to place faith in the concept of an unknown, unknowable, all-knowing, all-powerful conscious mind that came from absolutely nowhere, created the vastness of the material and ever changing universe out of its own immaterial self…. In brief, I can’t solve one mystery by having faith in another mystery which, if anything, I find even more mysterious. That is the agnostic’s dilemma.

In the thread referring to Egnor and his insights as a religious neurosurgeon, he describes the role of the soul directly supporting consciousness, as I know from his other writings which have been presented previously. Susan's view is from strict religious training, which I have't had.